Read The Song Before It Is Sung Online
Authors: Justin Cartwright
The Song Before It Is Sung (16 page)
And he thinks of fucking Emily. He can't bring himself in the privacy of his own head to use any other word. He counts the
number of times they have fucked and at the same time he keeps his head buried in his hands in deference to the location.
Fourteen. He is now very familiar with the topography of her body. In restaurants she encourages him to put his hand under
her skirt; she parts her thighs briefly. She is always smoking or drinking or licking the paper on a joint. She doesn't eat
much although she always orders a large plate of fries. She needs to fiddle, to handle, to taste, to suck. She is thin, but
- he remembers a phrase in a Hemingway novel — made for sex. Tony and his lightly powdered chum recognise it. But now he must
break it off. He's not sure she will mind; she'll move on fast and probably without regret; after all he remembers how they
met. But he can't be having sex with her and deal fairly and squarely with Francine at the same time.
He says the words of the Lord's Prayer to his atheist self and remembers just how beautiful they are. Most of the hanged in
Plotzensee were able to have last messages smuggled out. All these messages had a religious tone. Von Gottberg's, if he wrote
one, was lost, to his wife's great distress. This need to believe, this need to profess some faith in something - God or decency
or asceticism or conscience or homeopathy or country or the special qualities of animals or the Prophet's Night Ride or the
imminence of a new order — is a curse. As he kneels there he sees that to confess to believing in nothing ultimately is to
accept mortality unreservedly, which very few people are really prepared to do, although they know that the tide of death
can only rise.
The man who was eating stops in front of the altar and crosses himself. Perhaps he was not eating but self-administering the
host. He scowls competitively at Conrad as he passes. Conrad is now completely alone in this huge dark space. Water has seeped
into the stone over the years, so that the pews and the hymnbooks feel musty. There is the whiff of mushrooms in the air.
He stands up and walks towards the entrance. He sees a table with candles, none of them lit.
You may light a candle to bear witness if you make a voluntary donation.
He puts a pound in the box. It lands with a wooden noise that suggests that not many people have been bearing witness. Matches
are provided, which could be seen as an invitation to an arsonist, although it would be hard to start a fire in this dampness.
He lights a candle. The word witness, which the Church finds exciting, is puzzling. The way the Church intends it, it means
to profess your faith openly. But it can mean to sacrifice yourself. His candle is in remembrance of his father.
Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities mutinies; in countries discord, in palaces treason; and the bond
cracked 'twixt son and father . .
.
And he tells himself as he leaves the church that his cheap candle flickering in the dark is to restore the bond between son
and father, even at this late hour.
When he meets Emily she is already drunk. She is with three friends, a young man and two girls, which makes him uneasy. She
is sitting on a stool with a cigarette in one hand. Her denim skirt is halfway up her thighs. She introduces him to her friends
and they pour him a glass of wine. The friends are like amiable Labradors. They are simply waiting to see where the drink
and the dope and the night will take them. They make noises that he can't fully understand. They whoop and laugh. He can in
fact get the words, but he finds it hard to discern any sentences. They talk about friends who got mashed or arrested or crashed
their cars -
whoop, whoop -
but it is never clear where or in what order these things have happened. They are unnaturally loud. The two girls have flat,
bare stomachs and their breasts demand attention, not by being buxom or womanly, but by having a kind of life of their own,
small lascivious creatures, barely under control.
'Emily?'
'Yuh?'
'Can I talk to you for a moment?'
'Go ahead.'
'Just you and me. Outside.'
'OK.'
She places a hand on his shoulder and slides off the bar stool, unsure of the whereabouts of the floor. He can see that she
is wearing red knickers. When they are standing outside she kisses him.
'I can't stay, Em. I've got a problem. I'm going now.'
She isn't taking it in.
'Give me a bell when you're free. I don't know where we will be.'
'OK.'
'Love you a bunch.'
She stands on the pavement unsteadily. She's like a mountaineer at very high altitude: the air outside is too thin to sustain
her. There is a tragic lapse before she gathers herself and goes happily back into the pub.
He walks down to the river and phones Francine. It is just dark enough for the lights on the embankment to show on the water,
which is running full and dark. Francine doesn't answer, but he leaves a message.
'Fran, I would like you to come back, if that's what you want. And I think we should have the baby. I've told Emily I am not
seeing her again, whatever.'
Although, of course, Emily has no idea.
FRANCINE, HE HAS realised, doesn't fully believe him. She thinks that this is just another of the delusions he has lived by
for so long. She thinks, despite everything, despite the scale of her betrayal, that he is the unreliable one. Let's take
it one step at a time, she says. She will do locum work and stay where she is until she is sure he is sure. She would also
like to know if there is going to be an end to his work on Mendel's papers.
'Do you mean you would like to see me employed?'
'If we have the baby, I won't be able to work for six months and when I do go back to work, you won't want to be sitting at
home all day looking after a baby and working on your papers at the same time. So yes, it would be better if you had a job
and we could afford a nanny.'
Over this conversation hangs a conditional, which he can't contemplate: the existence or non-existence of a baby.
'Fran, we are going to have the baby. As for Mendel and his papers, I am going to follow this right through. I'm waiting now
for a man called Fritsch to contact me. He may have some vital information. I know what you are thinking. But I can't tell
you the nature of the information, it's not secret or anything, but I just feel I have to explore it myself. And then I'll
know where this is leading.'
'Conrad, you must do whatever it is you think you have to. I've learned that lesson. All I am concerned with is the practical
arrangements.'
It's not true of course. She's concerned with far more; even now, chastened, almost embarrassingly humbled, she is weighing
up his reliability. She has had her hair cut, as if to suggest that she is shriven; although he said how much he liked it
and how young it made her look, he was shocked. In fact she looks older and gaunt, even slightly potty. He remembers her walking
hand in hand with John near the hospital, her hair incandescent - her hair was in love — and he sees this act of contrition
as a realisation that she has to accept her lot: he is part of her climb-down. She must accept the unreliable, useless husband,
indulging himself as usual. He sees the simulacrum of their relationship increasingly often amongst friends and acquaintances:
the wife whose success and determination license the husband for a life of futility. It is a phenomenon of the new century.
And often these house husbands drink or say they are writing a novel or profess to love children or they make furniture or
sleep with the nanny. Has Mendel given me these papers to unman me? But then he thinks of Mendel in old age, with those small
dark eyes, which appeared to consist only of irises, sitting in his collapsed chair, dressed in a three-piece suit, talking
about Conrad's thesis and gently suggesting books he should read and opening his mind — how banal but how literal a phrase
— to something extraordinary, a very personal but also wide-ranging understanding of human aspirations and longings. He remembers,
as if it were spoken five minutes before, Mendel telling him that mankind's greatest delusion is the belief that one day the
world will arrive at an ideal state of affairs, a heaven on earth where all values will be in harmony and all problems will
be solved. Not only does he remember the words, he hears the way Mendel spoke them, with just a trace of his immigrant origins
- a sort of East European warble in the vowels lingered in the oddly patrician English.
He had told Mendel that day that he had learned about his father taking money from the National Party to print stories about
Mandela and the ANC that were untrue.
Conrad, in times of great stress, of historic upheaval, people react in unpredictable ways. All I can say to you is that,
in my experience, people under these circumstances are desperate to share the possibility of intimate communications. From
what you have told me about your father, I would guess that he was expressing his understanding of the nature of truth. However
personally disadvantageous, he seems to have decided that he could not subscribe to the idea that a heaven on earth was about
to be ushered in.
Conrad did not ask him to be more precise. He took this to mean that Mendel was suggesting that his father wanted to be true
to something irreducible. He couldn't embrace another myth, another set of lies. And that was more or less exactly what his
father, mad-eyed in the empty cottage, told Conrad a few years later. He sitting alone beneath his blue-and-red Balliol blade,
Bumped Ch Ch, Trinity, Pembroke, Wadham, 1959.
Conrad noted the names and weights of the crew, all recorded reverentially on the blade. His father asked Conrad not to contact
him again under any circumstances. Conrad boarded the small train at Clovelly Station, the first step on his journey back
to England, his heart broken.
No, Mendel wanted to draw him fully into the understanding of how things really work in history, among humans: what it means
to be one of these creatures in a time of confusion and moral turmoil. And Mendel wanted him to try to understand what von
Gottberg had done, which perhaps he hadn't fully understood himself. He wasn't expecting an answer, of course, only requiring
that Conrad never cease from exploring this and other mysteries.
Shelley wrote in his
Defence of Poetry
that poets are hierophants — he had to look the word up — priests who carry the sacred knowledge from one generation to another.
If he told Francine that he was carrying some sacred spark, she might have him sectioned. Doctors are entitled to do this.
He's waiting for Fritsch. In the meanwhile on a large chart attached to a wall with Blu-tack, he is filling in von Gottberg's
known movements. He sees patterns: he is in Berlin, meeting friends at the Romanisches Café, the Adlon and the Foreign Press
Association, as he establishes himself in the Auswartiges Amt at 137 Kurfürstendamm, which is the information and research
department, as an expert on England. There he finds many like-minded people, who believe that Germany is being led to disaster.
Increasingly often he has meetings with Helmuth James von Moltke; there are reports that they argue fiercely. He also finds
that the generals, who have it in their power to end this madness, are unable to act decisively, although after the Russian
campaign and more than a million German deaths they all see that the writing is on the wall. All except for the C-in-C, the
Führer. He is living in a Wagnerian world.
Von Gottberg feels an overwhelming desire to tell the English the true story, that Germany is chaotic and that there is another
Germany, which needs encouragement to forsake Hitler. Claus von Stauffenberg, who at the beginning came back from France exalted
by military success, has returned from the East with 10 Panzer Division saying that the time has come for the secret Germany
to assert itself. The generals have failed the people: the colonels must act. According to von Stauffenberg, the secret Germany
is a nobler place with its roots deep in the past, deep in the forests. Its prophet is the poet Stefan George; von Stauffenberg
and his brothers see themselves even now as carrying on George's task. He recites George's poem, 'The Antichrist', to von
Gottberg in a flat liturgical way, the way the Master ordained:
You will hang out your tongues, but the trough will be drained
You will stampede like cattle whose barn is on fire
And dreadful
will be the blast of the last trumpet.
The last trumpet had sounded at Stalingrad. Our armies, he said, were like a puff of wind on the steppes.
To his sister Adelheid, von Gottberg describes von Stauffenberg as a classical hero. He tells her that von Stauffenberg had
once thought that, after winning the Russian campaign, the Army would be able to turn its attention to the SS. For the German
nobility, Himmler is in many ways worse than Hitler. It is Himmler's
Einsatzgruppen
that have turned the people of Eastern Europe, potential allies in the war with Russia, against Germany.
As the war progressed von Gottberg travelled to Switzerland and to Sweden four or five times. But nobody listened. The Allies
had already decided that anything less than unconditional surrender could not be contemplated. And, anyway, after his visit
to Washington and his meeting with Hamburger, he was not taken seriously. Mendel had destroyed his credibility.
Mendel may occasionally have heard of von Gottberg's doomed efforts, or read his messages sent via the World Council of Churches
and Swedish clerics and American journalists. Von Gottberg had a meeting with Allen Dulles in Berne, and a meeting with a
British agent in Stockholm who advised him that the British Government would take the resistance more seriously if it produced
results. Although von Gottberg wrote from Geneva and Stockholm to Elizabeth Partridge, there are no letters to Mendel.
By the end of 1943 von Gottberg has a son and a daughter and his wife is pregnant again, but he is unable to spend much time
at Pleskow where his wife and children are kept company by his sister Adelheid and his mother. The effects of war have finally
reached Pleskow, where the estate is neglected and the medieval reverie is over.
The conspirators are a loose band, diplomats, army officers, religious leaders. They meet and they drink and they argue, but
their plans come to nothing, until, with the arrival of von Stauffenberg, there is a new determination. Von Stauffenberg is
fearless and utterly convinced. Unlike the generals, he has no qualms about repudiating his oath to the Führer. In his mind,
the Führer is the Antichrist. He is tireless in recruiting, and he relies heavily on von Gottberg and others for advice about
how to order the new Germany that is to follow the removal of Hitler. By the beginning of 1944, soon after von Stauffenberg
is appointed to the General Staff, a plan is drawn up to use the Reserve Army's emergency plan, Valkyrie, designed to mobilise
Berlin in the event of an insurrection, as the starting point of a putsch.
In April 1944, Elizabeth receives a letter from von Gottberg, suggesting a meeting in Stockholm. Her husband has been killed
in a plane crash in West Africa, but it is not certain if von Gottberg knows this; he makes no mention of it. The letter is
postmarked Geneva:
Elizabeth darling Please let us meet. I will be in Sweden for a few days in May.
Can you find a way of meeting me there? Leave a message addressed to the concierge of the Grand Hotel. Ask him to hold it
for Mr Axel arriving May 4th. Our love will survive. But I fear unless you can come to Stockholm, we won't meet in this world.
A
Elizabeth has written
No!
on the letter and underlined it. As he waits for Fritsch and fills in his chart Conrad sees where this life is leading: to
the gallows. Meanwhile Mendel is having a fine time - often in Washington, close to the seat of power, his reports read by
Churchill, his advice valued and sought. He has even met the woman he is to marry some years later.
Conrad and Francine go to the cinema together as they used to, to see a French film. It is not a good choice under the circumstances,
the enigmatic story of a woman in her thirties who has an affair with a total stranger; they never exchange their names and
meet once a month in one of those small French hotels that appear to have been made entirely of gloomy lacquered wood with
darkly atmospheric corridors on time switches. Once they make love at excruciating length, for a film, in one of the corridors
when the lights go out. He glances at Francine to see if she is suffering any painful recall, but her face is set, resigned,
although in the gloom it is hard to tell exactly what her expression indicates. Eventually the lover fails to turn up for
a rendezvous and the woman wanders around Paris, chic even in her despondency. At the end of the film the woman is seen eating
lunch on the He de Re with her husband and two silent children. Seafood, in abundance. Nothing is resolved.
'Bit of a downer,' he says over dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant.
'Yes, not a good choice. Sorry.'
'No personal resonances, I hope?'
'Don't go there. You know I feel utterly ashamed and foolish.'
'Will you move back in?'
'I want to, but I don't think it's right or fair. Although I am longing to put everything back. It's not fair on you. We must
be sure.'
'How long have we got?'
'Oh, some weeks.'
Conrad hears the sound of a clock ticking loudly. It's the West-clox in his grandmother's kitchen, on the window ledge beneath
the flypaper. His grandmother looked after him and his sister when his mother died and his father was so busy with the newspaper.
Often in that house the sound of the clock ticking and the flies battering themselves futilely on the windowpanes or struggling
in the flypaper was amplified unbearably by the heavy afternoon stillness. The clock is now ticking for his — or John's -
child. The ticking is entering the silences he and Francine cannot fill.
She won't come back to the flat. She takes a bus and he sets off walking to Camden. He wonders if they can be truly reconciled
with this business of the child hanging over them. If they have the child, will he look out for physical resemblances or demand
a test? It's easy for him to be magnanimous now, because he has found himself on the high ground. She is waiting for him to
make some decisive movement, but it is not clear to him what more he can do than to ask her to come back without conditions.
She is the one who needs to convince herself, but characteristically she is transferring her doubts to him. He walks past
King's Cross where there is always a thin stream of human activity of the marginal variety; here it is possible for illegal
immigrants to pick up fares in their clapped-out cars, for touts from cheap hotels to look for custom, for prostitutes, whose
shoes and clothes and hair reek of despair, to linger. In dog kennels selling fried chicken and cut-price burgers, pimps and
drug dealers gather. In all cities railway stations have an allure for the desperate: with their massive anonymity and twenty-four-hour
life they are power-stations providing the wattage these people need to survive.